Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia CEE Spring 2023/Final Report

Final Learning Report

Report Status: Accepted

Due date: 01 March 2024

Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund

Report type: Final

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General information

This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving Wikimedia Community Funds or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their final results.

Name of Organization: Wikimedia Community User Group CEE Spring
Title of Proposal: Wikimedia CEE Spring 2023
Amount awarded: 10530.79 USD, 9800 EUR
Amount spent: 6232.6 EUR

Part 1 Understanding your work

1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.

CEE Spring 2023 ran from 21 March to 31 May 2023. As usual in the past years, the international team set up the infrastructure by creating all the necessary pages, whereas the communities were invited to join the contest by signing up and creating the local infrastructure. Article lists were created by the local communities, with non-participating communities being allowed to create own article lists. Two sub-contests were organised alongside the main writing contest: 1) CEE Women and 2) CEE for Human Rights. The former was conducted for the third time with the goal of bridging the gender gap by writing articles about notable women, while the latter took place for the first time and was linked to the WikiForHumanRights writing campaign whose run fully overlapped with that of CEE Spring.

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?

The top-down approach in organising the contest again proved to be successful. There are three main parties that are necessary for successfully achieving the project's goals. The role and responsibilities of each are explained in turn.

International team. The work of the international team involves setting up all the infrastructure for the project from writing the grant request and creating the pages to evaluating the project and thinking about the future steps. This team is composed of people with long-term experience in community engagement and international projects, who are eager to invest their time and efforts to reach out to underrepresented communities and identify new topics of interest. The international team also works on finding local organisers and communicating the rules and principles of the contest with them.

Local organisers. The local organisers are the people who take the role and responsibility to bring the contest closer to their communities. These are the people who care about the compilation of article lists, setting the local rules of participation, assembling the jury for evaluating the articles and determining the prizes for the most prolific participants. Local organisers are also engaged in promoting the contest in their language so that editors are attracted to take part.

Participants. The work of the participants in the contest is the main factor determining the project's success content-wise. In fact, participants are editors who devote their time to write articles from the proposed lists. In many cases, the distribution of prizes and the local rules play an important role in the number of attracted participants and the size of their contributions. A successful local project requires regular communication between the local organisers and participants.

3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?

In addition to these groups, the two staff members of the CEE Hub, Barbara Klen and Toni Ristovski, supported this year's project in terms of documenting and formalising the setup process, as well as contacting local organisers and contacting new communities that might be interested in joining.

This helped a lot with ensuring that no aspects of the project setup were missed and the created document will be useful in upcoming years as a guideline, making the project less dependent on the know-how of the individual international project members.

4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.

Different communication channels were used to reach out to the CEE communities, including the CEE mailing list and CEE groups on the social networks. Additionally, community leaders from the previous years were personally contacted in order to see if they would be interested to organise it again. Following the trend from the previous years, advertising the project via the CEE mailing list and the Facebook group continued to decline on account of the increased use of the Telegram group as more dynamic and interactive means of communication. During the course of the project, the project was also promoted through a central notice on top of the page. On the local level, many community leaders shared general information about the project on their village pump and some of them opted to publish a site notice with information about the local contest in their language.

5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

There were several pages on which various statistics about the project's implementation were generated and regularly updated. They are available on the following links:

6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.

Our efforts during the Fund period have helped to...
A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups	Agree
B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community	Strongly agree
C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups	Strongly agree
D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives	Strongly agree
E. Encourage the retention of editors	Agree
F. Encourage the retention of organizers	Agree
G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement.	Agree

7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?

CEE Spring is an outreach effort to promote diversity, so it has always encouraged participation by underrepresented communities. The writing of content about underrepresented communities was eased because article lists were compiled for non-participating communities.Such examples are the Crimean Tatar, Roma and Sorbian communities

Part 2: Your main learning

8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?

Our main learning priority was to reveal the direction in which the writing contest develops, which could be used for planning the future editions of the contest. The main lessons learned in that regard are summarised as follows:

Involving underrepresented groups takes a lot of time and effort in terms of onboarding and establishing the benefit to a community. Regional networks like the CEE Hub can help faciliate that because they have the contacts and resources to enable this easier and with less misunderstandings.
Documenting the CEE Spring process helped identify many gaps that can be addressed before the next contest starts, to avoid problems later on
The current format of the contest helps to increase content coverage, promotes an efficient way of developing a healthy community and stimulates the growth of smaller projects.
Getting larger language communities involved, in particular the English Wikipedia community, can facilitate further translation of local content that exists only in smaller languages because the articles would be translated in a major global language that is widely understood. While this is still a learning, it is a challenge to actually implement this without any support by en.wp itself.

9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?

The war in Ukraine and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan continues to impact contribution numbers and creates a general tension that requires more attention than in previous years. Sensibilities need to be taken into account, interactions between different communities need to be minimised to avoid endangering volunteers on both sides, and the generally insecure situation in Russia means that our support for those communities needed to be revisited.

Having CEE Hub staff involved as support for communication and outreach yielded some unexpected results that showed how important these lines of communication are for a regional project like CEE Spring.

10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?

Improving communication opens up many new possibilities in improving the sustainability of CEE Spring and maybe also shifting part of the focus to parts of large language Wikipedias that would benefit more from improved instead of new articles. In the long term it has become obvious that including CEE Spring in the CEE Hub yearly plan would also greatly improve integration in the goals of the CEE Hub, but this is still a bit off because of organisational reasons (including the movement charter).

11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?

That despite all the political and social tensions in the region Wikimedians still understand the value of exchange and understanding each other, writing about each other to further understanding and a common goal.

12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

The main resources related to CEE Spring can be found on the following links:

Part 3: Metrics

13a. Open and additional metrics data

Open Metrics
Open Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Number of participants	Number of participants across all Wikimedia projects - how healthy is the contest? How to events (like the war in Ukraine or revolutions in the area in past years) affect contributions to this contest?	500	332	Conflicts in the region and the economic outlook are probably two factors for the low number of participants. Even so, the numbers are now more evenly spread out across the different language projects. Will have to be a target to analysis this further for 2024.	https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2023/Statistics/Authors_list
Number of female authors	This number has been decreasing in past years, we are also reliant on people using that setting in their Wikimedia account for self-identification.	100	28	Numer of female authors has slightly grown from last year (25 up to 28), but considering the often toxic environment that female authors are editing in and the topics they wright about, it makes it quesitonable if this metric is useful going forward.	https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2023/Statistics/Authors_list
Number of new authors	How many new editors does this contest attract and how does this number compare to previous years?	50	26	Number of new authors has also risen and the percentage compared to the overall number of authors has risen signifcantly.	https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2023/Statistics/Authors_list
Number of articles about women	How do subcontests like CEE Women and highlighting female biografies in en.wp motivate authors to write about them?	1500	1661	Sticking to a line of thinking and establishing it does pay off eventually :-)	https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2023/Statistics/Articles_about_women
Minimum number of articles per Wikipedia	Ensure that a minimum level of activity is happening on all participating Wikipedias, within their capabilities	100	2	This metric probably needs a qualifier, i.e. limiting the number 100 to the top 10 Wikipedias. Smaller communities do not have the same stability or consistency, which leads to big fluctuations in the number of contributions.	https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Spring_2023/Statistics/Article_list

Additional Metrics
Additional Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of people reached through social media publications	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of activities developed	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Number of volunteer hours	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

13b. Additional core metrics data.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics	Description	Target
Number of participants	Number of participants across all Wikimedia projects - how healthy is the contest? How to events (like the war in Ukraine or revolutions in the area in past years) affect contributions to this contest?	500
Number of editors	Number of participants across all Wikimedia projects - how healthy is the contest? How to events (like the war in Ukraine or revolutions in the area in past years) affect contributions to this contest?	500
Number of organizers	Number of Wikipedia projects taking part in the contest	30

**Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project**
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?

No

15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.

N/A

16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

N/A

Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships

17. Organizational Capacity

Organizational capacity dimension
A. Financial capacity and management	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
B. Conflict management or transformation	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values)	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
D. Partnership building	This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it
E. Strategic planning	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
F. Program design, implementation, and management	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer)	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers)	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
J. Governance	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
K. Communications, marketing, and social media	This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it
L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
M. On-wiki technical skills	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
N. Accessing and using data	This capacity has grown but it should be further developed
O. Evaluating and learning from our work	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders	This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high
N/A
N/A

17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Formal training provided by a Wikimedia Movement organizing group (i.e., Affiliates, Grantees, Regional or Thematic Hub, etc.)

17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Lack of training that fits contextual needs and interests

18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?

N/A

19. Partnerships over the funding period.

Over the fund period...
A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame)	Agree
B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups	Agree
C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups	Agree

19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Permanent staff outreach

19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.

Difficulties specific to our context that hindered partnerships

20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?

Has been mentioned above in question 10.

Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration

21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?

Not sure this question applies. CEE Spring is a culmination of collaboration among CEE communities, so the sense of belonging is derived from that collaboration.

22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Stayed the same

23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

N/A

24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?

Stayed the same

25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.

N/A

26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.

N/A

Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration

We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.

27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?

Yes

27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?

CEE Meeting 2023
Online calls of the CEE Hub

28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?

We do this occasionally (less than once a month)

29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?

N/A

Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance

30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

6232.6

31. Local currency type

EUR

32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.

Report funds received and spent, if template not used.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qlPmRQQLDxPTBSE5BMbvIaUjje99Y6sELKbyMiNJWF8/edit#gid=0

33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.

N/A

34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?

34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.

3.567,40€

Some smaller communities didn't ask for prize money and some countries did not use all of the funding available.

34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?

B. Propose to use them to partially or fully fund a new/future grant request with PO approval

34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.

Move those funds over to CEE Spring 2024.

35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?

As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?

Yes

37. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.

Yes

38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.